Books: Fourteenth & Final

THE SEVENTH OF OCTOBER (295 pp.)Jules Romains, translated by Gerard
HopkinsKnopf ($3).

Put out more flags; this is the end.

Jules Romains' colossal super-novel, Men of Good Will, has at last
ground to a wordy stop, after 14 volumes (the original French runs to
27), some 7,500 pages, and about 1,000 characters.

The most grandiose literary project of a generation, introduced to the
U.S. public more than a dozen years ago (TIME, June 5, 1933), Men of
Good Will has been admired from a safe distance by many, praised to the
skies by a few, actually read in its entirety by still fewer. It...